had spared them.  My poor people whom I loved so well!  There is just another die to turn up against me in this run of ill-luck, i. e. if I should break my magic wand in the fall from this elephant, and lose my popularity with my fortune.  Then Woodstock and Boney” [his life of Napoleon] “may both go to the paper-maker, and I may take to smoking cigars and drinking grog, or turn devotee and intoxicate the brain another way."[52] He adds that when he sets to work doggedly, he is exactly the same man he ever was, “neither low-spirited nor distrait,” nay, that adversity is to him “a tonic and bracer.”

The heaviest blow was, I think, the blow to his pride.  Very early he begins to note painfully the different way in which different friends greet him, to remark that some smile as if to say, “think nothing about it, my lad, it is quite out of our thoughts;” that others adopt an affected gravity, “such as one sees and despises at a funeral,” and the best-bred “just shook hands and went on.”  He writes to Mr. Morritt with a proud indifference, clearly to some extent simulated:—­“My womenkind will be the greater sufferers, yet even they look cheerily forward; and, for myself, the blowing off of my hat on a stormy day has given me more uneasiness."[53] To Lady Davy he writes truly enough:—­“I beg my humblest compliments to Sir Humphrey, and tell him, Ill Luck, that direful chemist, never put into his crucible a more indissoluble piece of stuff than your affectionate cousin and sincere well-wisher, Walter Scott."[54] When his Letters of Malachi Malagrowther came out he writes:—­“I am glad of this bruilzie, as far as I am concerned; people will not dare talk of me as an object of pity—­no more ‘poor-manning.’  Who asks how many punds Scots the old champion had in his pocket when

    ’He set a bugle to his mouth,
      And blew so loud and shrill,
    The trees in greenwood shook thereat,
      Sae loud rang every hill.’

This sounds conceited enough, yet is not far from truth."[55] His dread of pity is just the same when his wife dies:—­“Will it be better,” he writes, “when left to my own feelings, I see the whole world pipe and dance around me?  I think it will.  Their sympathy intrudes on my present affliction.”  Again, on returning for the first time from Edinburgh to Abbotsford after Lady Scott’s funeral:—­“I again took possession of the family bedroom and my widowed couch.  This was a sore trial, but it was necessary not to blink such a resolution.  Indeed I do not like to have it thought that there is any way in which I can be beaten.”  And again:—­“I have a secret pride—­I fancy it will be so most truly termed—­which impels me to mix with my distresses strange snatches of mirth, ‘which have no mirth in them.’"[56]